Well, you wouldn’t know it because I schedule these in advance, and like the last two games, so far in advance I don’t actually know when they’ll go out… But I’ve done all three of the original Halo trilogy in the space of a weekend from my perspective. It’s important to get them cranked out while the others are fresh in your mind, especially if there’s going to be comparison.
Halo 3 is, as one would expect, the finale to the story set up by the events of Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 – that is, the war between the humans and the covenant, their discovery of the ancient rings with the power to destroy all sentient life in the galaxy, and The Flood, an alien hive-mind that seeks to control the entire universe by inhabiting the bodies of other sentient life. This instalment sees you returning to Earth to find that a covenant leader is digging up some artifact which will lead to a site where he can remotely activate all of the remaining intergalactic superweapons – the Halo devices – leading us to go on a quest to find and stop this alien leader, then find some way of eradicating The Flood, ultimately by activating a single Halo device and doing our darnedest to get the hell out of the blast radius as quickly as possible.
As far as plot goes, it’s actually pretty easy to follow. It sounds more complicated than it is, but it’s very much a matter of “okay, we’re stopping this guy, oh no, these guys are getting in the way now, let’s stop them too, but now we’re friends, so let’s…” and so on throughout the course of the game. It does, in that sense, get a bit repetitive, but overall it’s a decent plot. The scenery detail making up the areas the plot takes place in could do with some work, with a lot of it feeling like non-descript hallways and alleyways and canyons, but there is at least the addition of some new weapons, vehicles and the use of equipment. I’d like to expand on all three of these, individually.
In terms of weaponry, they introduced an additional two grenade types – a sort of sticky grenade that acts like a frag grenade, and what looks like a small napalm grenade. In contrast, they halved the amount of each grenade you can carry, so that you can only have two of teach, which means that the way you play has to change somewhat – if you miss with your grenade, you don’t have potentially three more to adjust your angles and take another attempt, you’ve got one more before the grenade type changes and acts slightly differently. I don’t mind the change, it’s just something to be mindful of. They also brought in some new guns – mostly heavier weapons, so far as I could see, which force you into a third person perspective and slow you down, but do increased damage. The one that caught my eye was the flamethrower, in a Flood invested hallway-fest. It worked for the most part, but alas, not enough ammunition to be much use for long.
There are also more, by my reckoning, vehicle sections, with some in the middle of levels for more than just quick traversal across the map – for example, there comes a time when you’re given, effectively, some dragonfly style helicopters that you can buzz around in, purely to make a fight against two giant walking tanks (scarabs) easier. The use of airborne weaponry to take down anti-air confused me, though perhaps I wasn’t meant to use that method of destroying the tanks that were shooting at our pilots. Plenty of tank sections, some more alien vehicles, but I tend to stick to my trusty warthog when possible, just so I’ve got the two gunners with me until we roll and someone ends up dying.
Then there’s the equipment. This is a bit of a weird one, because what they’ve done is given us single-use pickups that can be used to modify the environment and make fights more interesting – you get a shield bubble, you get a regeneration sphere, you get a landmine – all that sort of stuff. Thing is, more often than not, I never really found the idea of them all that helpful, and even often forgot that I had them. I’m sure a more taxing run would rely on them heavily, and therefore acknowledge that my rush through because I fancied playing it, and didn’t mind cheating, probably hindered my interest in them, but I did still use them, if only to remind myself that they existed in the first place.
There’s also been a UI update, with the visual changes being as unexplained by the video game canon as the sudden appearance of some humans that I’m pretty sure we left behind in Halo 2, when we start Halo 3. No doubt these are all explained by the expanded materials, but I shouldn’t have to read them to get major plot points. The UI thing, sure, I get that, but the major plot points should be covered by the games. I do consider the UI, specifically the HUD, to be an improvement on the second game, which in turn was an improvement on the first, so it was at least a worthwhile amendment that they’ve made.
In the grand scheme of things, I do believe that this game is a decent ending to the trilogy. It concludes the overarching story nicely, whilst simultaneously setting up the events of Halo 4 in a way that allow for it to have never been made at all, much like the ending of Quantum Leap. Master Chief is in stasis, drifting in deep space, and there is no guarantee that he will ever be found by plot-relevant entities. The fact that he is in Halo 4 (spoilers) is remarkable, really, but more remarkable things have happened in less remarkable series’, so I shouldn’t complain. Ultimately, I suppose in an infinite universe, the odds of him being found were 1. That’s a little probability statement for you to mull over.
At the end of the day, it’s a good game. It’s an improvement on the second in the series, but I don’t think it quite surpasses the quality of the original as a whole. Don’t get me wrong, the UI is better, the variety of weapons is better, but I think the plot lacks a little… I don’t even know what. The stakes feel higher here, I’ll give it that, higher than in either of the previous games, despite the overall situation being that you’re stopping all life in the universe being wiped out or taken over in each of the games. That some of it properly takes place on Earth with The Flood probably makes all the difference.
7/10
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